There are a couple of options for accessing artifacts in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository at development time. (NB I used to call them artefacts but this seemed to confuse the Americans!) If you are using WebSphere Integration Developer (Version 6.0.2) then you can use the Enterprise Service Discovery wizard to query a registry and retrieve artifacts. This support is the subject of a new developerWorks article.
The other option is the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Eclipse Plug-in. This is available as SupportPac SA02 and can be used with any Eclipse runtime at Version 3.0.2 or above. This includes products such as Rational Application Developer, WebSphere Integration Developer and the WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit. Whereas the Enterprise Service Discovery wizard uses the web services API for the registry, the Eclipse plugin uses the EJB API. This means you need to ensure that you are running Eclipse with an IBM JRE so that the plugin can use the IBM ORB. A couple of times after installing the plugin in to WebSphere Integration Developer I have had problems with my Business Integration perspective disappearing or a broken Business Integration view. Closing the workspace, deleting the eclipse/configuration directory and then restarting seems to fix the problem.
And why would I want to add the Eclipse plugin to WebSphere Integration Developer? The key benefit is that the plugin not only allows you to query the registry and import artifacts, but also enables you to publish new artifacts up to the repository simply by right-clicking on them in the Resource perspective and selecting Service Registry > Publish Document. If you want to publish multiple dependent artifacts (for example a WSDL and the schema that it imports) then you either need to ensure that you publish the documents in the correct order so that the repository can always resolve dependencies (e.g. schema then WSDL) or publish them together as a new concept.